If you own the iPhone 8 or any of the earlier iPhones, you obviously rely on the physical home button for accessing your home screen and securing your phone with Touch ID. Have you pressed your home button recently and iphone home button not working happens? Maybe you got stuck on the lock screen and placing your thumb on the home button just won't help? Don't panic, you're not the only one facing the same problem, and it takes a few tips/tricks to fix it, or better still, get a workaround for the meantime.
In this post, we'll guide you on some possible hacks to fix iPhone home button not working. Just try all the fixes till you find the perfect solution for you.
Turn on Assistive Touch
If your iPhone home button is playing tricks on you and wouldn't respond to your touches, there are a couple of fixes to try. But first things first, we recommend you enable Assistive Touch to help you in place of the home button, then you can try other fixes below.
Assistive Touch is Apple's way of helping people with various disabilities operate the iPhone to its fullest. Meanwhile, in your case where the home button is not working on iPhone, Assistive Touch is a traditional solution to help you in the meantime before finding a permanent solution to it. Enabling Assistive Touch is pretty simple. Just follow the steps below.
- From your home screen, find and open the iPhone Settings
- Scroll down a bit and select
- From there, go ahead and click
- Now select Assistive Touch and toggle on the switch to enable it.
As soon as you enable Assistive Touch on your iPhone, you'll see a bubble (small circle) appear on your screen. You can drag the small circle anywhere on the screen for easy access. Tapping the small circle will give you some options like Home, Siri, Control centre and more. You can tap the small circle, then select Home anytime you need to go to the home screen.
But since you only need the Assistive Touch just for the home button, you can configure it to go directly to the home screen without opening the menu. Here's how to do that;
- Go back to where you enabled the Assistive Touch (Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Assistive Touch).
- While you're on the Assistive Touch settings page, select Customize Top Level Menu.
- Tap on the remove (-) button on the screen to remove all the shortcuts.
- Now tap the last shortcut and select The Assistive Touch will now take you straight to the home screen when you tap it.
Clean your iPhone home button
As time goes by, your home button is liable to attract dirt and moisture particles from your environment or your fingers. This becomes even more apparent if you work in a dusty place or if your thumb is always wet.
This is a common issue that builds up and causes temporary or permanent damage to the home button. But not to be afraid, a light cleaning might help you fix iphone home button not working again.
To clean the home button, you need just a few tools. Get a cotton bud or a soft clean cloth, then splash a sizable amount of alcohol on the cotton bud or clean cloth. Now gently clean the home button with the cotton bud and wait for a few minutes to let it dry.
Charge the phone to see whether it works
As well as cleaning the home button as mentioned above, some iPhone users reported they had their home button working again after charging the phone. The same simple hack may work for you as well. If your iPhone home button stops working, just grab your charging brick and attach your original iPhone lightning USB cable and charge your phone for a couple of minutes. Unplug your charger and test the home button to see if it works.
Update the phone system
There are chances your iPhone home button is stuck because you're running an outdated version of iOS on your iPhone. More often than not, your iPhone may be exposed to malware or develop some software glitches if it's not up-to-date. So, to ensure your home button issue is not caused by a software anomaly, go ahead to the iPhone Settings and check for updates. If you have any pending update, connect to a strong Wifi network to download and install the update. Safely restart your iPhone after that. It might fix the problem.
Find a professional for iPhone repair
If trying all the three other solutions above doesn't work for you, it's high time you visited the repair centre! Enabling Assistive Touch will do the trick perfectly, but it may take time to get used to it and may not be up to your expectations - compared to using the actual home button.
Fortunately, if you're still under your Apple warranty period, it's time to make use of it! Hopefully, they may be able to fix your home button for you at no cost. But if you're out of warranty, visiting a professional iPhone repairer within your vicinity won't be a bad option, but be prepared to pay some extra cas
